Avoiding the Boot

The greatness of the early Tom and Jerry cartoons relied on a number of things. One of them was the expressiveness of the characters. Audiences knew what they were thinking.

In this scene from Puss Gets the Boot, Tom is creeping away from the housekeeper, who has threatened him with eviction if he breaks anything else in the house. Almost instantly, he smacks into a table with a vase. The table wobbles. The expressions speak for themselves.



The last frame shows his annoyance when he hears Jerry behind him laughing at his plight.

Interestingly, when Tom is finally booted “o-u-w-t” of the house, it happens off-screen. That saves money-consuming animation. Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera did this time, and time, and time again in their TV cartoons (which, at least, involved a camera shake, which is more than what happens in this short).

Today marks the 85th anniversary of the cartoon’s official release date. You can read about the short in this transcription of the January-February 1940 edition of the MGM internal magazine “Short Story” in this post. The characters, according to Metro publicists, were named Jasper and Pee-Wee (with appearances by “the housekeeper,” who never had a name in the whole series).

Judging by the trades, the cartoon showed up somewhere in MGM’s release schedule between the start of October and the beginning of December 1939. The story remains to be found or told about how Hanna and Barbera managed to convince someone in power to let them join forces to direct a cartoon at what had been a studio full of internal politics since opening in 1937.